Monday, August 19, 2013

The Daily Beast's Patricia Murphy spoke to a number of people who knew Ted Cruz when he was a Princeton undergraduate. Some of them found him a bit odd:

When Craig Mazin first met his freshman roommate, Rafael Edward Cruz, he knew the 17-year-old Texan was not like other students at Princeton, or probably anywhere else for that matter.

"I remember very specifically that he had a book in Spanish and the title was Was Karl Marx a Satanist? And I thought, who is this person?" Mazin says of Ted Cruz. “Even in 1988, he was politically extreme in a way that was surprising to me.”

Yes, that book exists. It grew out of a pamphlet by a fairly well-known anti-communist named Richard Wurmbrand. There's a copy in Spanish Portuguese (apparently of just the pamphlet) at Scribd.*

In English, the book is known as Marx and Satan. A Goodreads reader praises it:

A fascinating book. I expected political conjecture or theological parallelism, but Wurmbrand offers the poetry of Marx and Engels themselves! Statements from Communists about working for Satan. Illumination of a (not entirely unknown) secret society, even, with its highest echelon called "Hell." Comparison of Satanist ritual with the writings and actions of Marxists of the highest pedigree.

Go to this PDF for a direct download. The full English text is also at Scribd. Here's some of Wurmbrand's "evidence" for Marx's Satanism:

One of the peculiarities of hack magic, as mentioned earlier, is the inversion of names. Inversions in general so permeated Marx's whole manner of thinking that he used them throughout. He answered Proudhon's book The Philosophy of Misery with another book entitled The Misery of Philosophy. He also wrote, "We have to use instead of the weapon of criticism, the criticism of weapons."

Here are further examples of Marx’s use of inversion in his writing:

Let us seek the enigma of the Jew not in his religion, but rather let us seek the enigma of his religion in the real Jew. Luther broke the faith in authority, because he restored the authority of faith. He changed the priests into laymen, because he changed the laymen into priests.

Marx used this technique in many places. He used what could be called typical Satanist style.

Shifting gears somewhat, men usually wore beards in Marx's time, but not beards like his, and they did not have long hair. Marx's manner and appearance was characteristic of the disciples of Joanna Southcott, a cultist priestess of an occult sect who claimed to be in contact with the ghost Shiloh.

But if this is what Cruz was reading -- in Spanish, no less ("This is America, speak English" wasn't a conservative slogan then?) -- in 1988, you have to imagine that he suffered a great loss when the Berlin Wall fell (tempered, of course, by the ongoing struggle against aging Fidel Castro), and thus he's still looking for a moral fight as pure as God vs. Satan and the Christian West vs. Communism ... which, according to this book he took to Princeton, are exactly the same fight.

That's frightening to me. It puts me in agreement with Cruz's freshman roommate:

Craig Mazin said he knew some people might be afraid to speak in the press about a senator, but added of Cruz, “We should be afraid that someone like that has power.”

And the idea that his freshman roommate could someday be the leader of the free world? “I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States. Anyone,” Mazin said. “I would rather pick somebody from the phone book."

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* UPDATE: Vincent Jørgensen points out in comments that Era Karl Marx um Satanista? is Portuguese, not Spanish. I'm monolingual, but even I should have figured that out from the "um." Here's what I was looking for -- no download available, but it can be found at the Harvard library (!) and (unsurprisingly) in the Miami-Dade Public Library System:

15 comments:

And he's what I always feared the most:Someone like Nixon - who was highly intelligent, but is much more of an ideologue and demagogue, than the Ol' Trickster. Who, fortunately, was patriot enough not to be a total sociopath - no matter how much he hated Communism.

Ted Cruz-ader cares about nothing, but Ted Cruz-ader - and proving his superiority over all others.

Wurmbrand's "evidence" is called "chiasmus," & was a popular literary device appearing throughout the Homeric epics, the Hebrew Bible & the New Testament. Also the Starkist Tuna ads: "We don't want tuna with good taste. We want tuna that tastes good." Satanist writings all, I guess.

Ha ha, Ted Cruz self-styled legal genius, thinks he can convince us he never realized he was a Canadian citizen by birth. And this even though he worked in the Bush WH and must have undergone a security clearance.

David Frum, who was also born in Canada, said in his book about George W. Bush that he had to be escorted everywhere he went within the White House when he was a Bush speechwriter, because he was a Canadian citizen. I wonder if Cruz had the same restriction.

It is extremely easy to RAIL and ridicule someone but mockery doesn't always prove one wrong.

I am aware of some flaws of the book but if you go through Bernard Maris's book about Marx ("Marx, O Marx, Pourquoi M'As-Tu Abandonné" (Marx, O Marx, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me) you will notice that the words "unlimited" are constantly used and that the goal of communism is to allow everyone to expand fully, until everyone becomes an unlimited being, even the separation between life and death is supposed to be abolished in a communistic society.

In fact, in Communism, everyone becomes... GOD. Remove the limitations imposed by capitalism and money, and bang, we can become unlimited beings living on an unlimited planet.

Trotski once said that once the revolution was achieved, everyone would be at least Da Vinci, which illusion seems to signify a refusal to consider that we don't all have the same capacities while having a same value. In magic/Satan worship the devil is called the lazy eight and is represented by the sign of the infinite because he entertained the idle dream of transcending the necessary limitations imposed by the Creator upon the Creation even though this would only be temporary.